By now the main arguments for and against the Quebec secularism charter have been made. They’ll be made all over again when public hearings on the issue begin next week.

Quebec Premier Pauline Marois has signalled she would rather fight an election over her government’s secularism bill than water it down. Public hearings on the bill starting next week may set the tone for just such an election.

Four months after the Parti Québécois’ secularism charter surfaced, googling the words “Quebec values charter” — as the plan was initially known — yields almost three million items in English and another million and a half in French.

No Quebec bill has been more hotly debated inside and out of the province since the language legislation brought forward in the late seventies.

By now the main arguments for and against the charter have been made — in both official languages and usually more than once.

There is no mystery as to where the protagonists in the debate stand or what pundits or public opinion in Quebec make of it. In most cases the positions are as entrenched as they are definitive.

A good number of the institutions that would be impacted by the charter have irreconcilable differences with the imposition of a secular dress code on their workers.

Their ranks include most of the province’s universities, Montreal’s municipal government as well as Quebec’s hospital network and a majority of doctors.

Otherwise sovereigntist-friendly labour unions such as the FTQ have warned that if the dress code comes to pass they may end up challenging it in court on behalf of some of their members.

On the other hand the main nurses’ union is on side as is the union that represents Quebec’s civil servants.

The issue similarly divides the electorate but a majority of francophone voters support it. Significantly from the partisan standpoint of the PQ, more Quebecers like the charter than the number that handed the party a minority government in 2012.

In a not totally unrelated development premier Pauline Marois has signalled that she would rather fight an election over her government’s signature bill than water it down. That may change but after an initial round of debate revealed widespread institutional resistance to the initiative last fall, the PQ came back with an even more restrictive version of its charter.

All this familiar territory is about to be revisited when a committee of the National Assembly begins a winter of public hearings on the issue next week.

More than 200 briefs have been filed with the committee — a number that suggests that the passions ignited by this debate are not on the wane.

For the sake of comparison, when a similar committee undertook to study a proposed overhaul of the language law last spring the exercise attracted only 73 briefs.

But no amount of repetition in public hearings will clarify the question that matters most to the future of this legislation and that is whether it even has a legal leg to stand on.

A legion of experts believe that it does not but there are dissenting voices.

Roger Tassé, a former top jurist with the federal government, is one of them.

As deputy minister of justice at the time of the patriation of the Constitution, Tassé was one of the architects of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In an interview broadcast by Radio-Canada over the holidays he argued that the Quebec plan amounted to such a minimal infringement on fundamental rights that it should pass muster with the Supreme Court.

In an op-ed piece published on Friday in the New York Times, PQ minister Jean-François Lisée went a step further. He suggested that the Supreme Court had soured on multiculturalism over the past few years and concluded that the debate over the Quebec charter “may be the last stand of Canada’s multiculturalist experiment.”

It would be easy to get a definitive answer.

Quebec could refer its bill to its top provincial court for advice before it goes any further.

But the PQ government’s preference is to wait to be dragged in court, ideally from the perspective of sovereigntist optics by an unpopular federal government.

Until then Quebec is in for a replay of last fall’s dialogue of the deaf that is expected to set the tone for an election showdown.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.